I never came here looking for Orcs.
Or Elves, or XP, or Treasure. It must be getting on for at least seven years now, since I started the self-destructive spiral that began with Everquest, back in 1999, but I was an online gamer, of sorts, before that, and it certainly didn’t used to be about firing my magic missiles at the darkness back then.
My very first real go at ‘online gaming’ was through the Microsoft Gaming Zone, which amounted to little more than a bunch of Chess and Tetris style games, and more importantly, a matchmaking lobby for proper games with network peer-to-peer multiplayer support. The Lucasarts space shooter ’X-Wing vs TIE Fighter’ was the real reason I was there, and I used to spend countless evenings in one-on-one furballs. Interweb-1998 could only really cope with an extremely pared down fight – an empty bit of space containing only two TIE-Fighters, and the subsequent death-grip, blink-and-you’ll-die duelling would seem incredibly repetitive now, but totally hooked me then. I even joined a clan, briefly, which back then merely meant making a new chat login with three letters in front of the old name. Heady days!
Then came an open beta for something called Raider Wars, my first persistent online game. It was a similar sort of thing – twitch-based space fighter combat – totally PvP, with no AI drones at all to shoot at. In this, three teams, the Osis, Vaught and Hast, battled it out for supremacy of 14 or so space stations, all in the one asteroid belt, using a variety of different roles of spaceship, form light fighters to heavy bombers, and even a robotic troop transporter to actually do the capturing. I forget exactly how many players were in there at once – about 40 or so? It seemed mind-blowing at the time though, and was a tremendous amount of fun for such a simple thing.
I’m not sure what happened to it in the end – the beta ended, AOL may have bought it and then sat on it – who knows, but there is precious little evidence of it anymore, even on Google, which does tend to remember everything.
Then came Mankind, by Vibes/Cryo Interactive, which may possibly be the first real MMO. It was certainly the first one I ever saw, and it was incredible – even back then, offering a great deal of what EVE Online does now, with a very Homeworld feel to it, although it predated Homeworld somewhat – large-scale space empire management, technology trees, resources, and thousands of players in the same bit of space. It even had planetary structures, ground tanks, and the like. It had a similarly high quality of art direction to EVE, as well, which can really make or break a space game.
It was also my first glimpse of what would become an all too familiar picture of MMO Quality Standards. The intial game was so laggy, buggy and generally unplayable, that they ended up giving me a year of free subscription, along with everyone else. The original subscription plan was yearly – you were supposed to buy a new version once a year, for the price of a normal retail game, around $50 or so? It’s probably all different by now.
It also featured extremely low content density, and a hostile and paranoid player-base, both aspects of MMO I would also come to know well. In the end I gave up completely – the whole experience being a bit to dull and slow for me at the time; unused to grinding or camping. I guess the apparent directionlessness of it all was a bit overwhelming to newbie-me, back then. After I left though, things picked up greatly for it.
I think at some point in the early 00’s, Cryo sold the rights and management to O2 Online Entertainment, who then managed to make Mankind very big in China, saving it from extinction, and from their website in-game news, last updated 9th Jan 2006, it is still going strong today – making it eight years old! I must pop in and have a look, but if the game now consists merely of a fixed and filled-out version of the game I remembered, then it’s at the least a good solid alternative to EVE Online.
Then came Jumpgate, NetDevil’s first foray into online games. They are more famous for the soon-to-be-ready Auto Assault now of course, but they’re not new to the scene by any stretch.
I found this at about the same time, in beta. Again, this one blew my socks off, and seemed suspiciously like a polished and more developed version of the earlier Raider Wars; three factions – twitch-based space flight. This had an economy, trading, mining, multiple sectors exploration, large-scale faction building projects, medals, and a whole load of other stuff that the more zealous Elite fan was looking for in a game. I quite enjoyed this one, but the introduction of an economy and equipment trees meant that it took a lot longer to get to the action, and the beta ended before I could really get anywhere significant. It was released in 2001, but I was well entrenched in Norrath by then.
Mentioning it in the previous post made me all nostalgic over it, and I had a look at their website – it seems to be being run by Themis Group now, but seems to still be there, and active, with game news updates as recent as yesterday, making this one over five years old and still going, although ‘still going’ seems to mean several hundred players, rather than hundreds of thousands. It seems to occupy that same niche middle-ground Planetside does; and Jumpgate lies halfway between the fast-paced mayhem of Freelancer, and the long-game strategy of EVE Online. The only other alternative experience anywhere near comparable, is the Jump To Lightspeed bit of Star Wars: Galaxies.
But I did enjoy it, and the main reason I didn’t pursue it further at the time, was that the internet, and more specifically my dial-up connection, was not up to the job of twitch space-combat. Perhaps now, they both are, so it’s high time I had another look. I know I'm done with Operation: Cheapseats, but these two titles do derseve a closer look, if only for sentimental reasons...so watch this space, for tales of space!
I never wanted to be an Adventurer…I wanted to be an Astronaut! I just got mugged by Orcs on the way to the launch-pad, that’s all…